Fiber optics have revolutionized the ability to transmit broadband data over long distances. However, less than fifty years ago, most scientists and engineers felt that fiber optics were too lossy to be effectively used for long distance communication. Early fibers had a loss on the order of 1 dB per meter, rendering any signal sent over a long distance too weak to recover. It wasn't until methods were found to remove impurities in glass that fiber optics became feasible for broadband communications.
As computer chip speeds on circuit boards increase to ever faster speeds, a communications bottleneck in inter-chip communication is becoming a larger problem. One likely solution is to use fiber optics to interconnect high speed computer chips. However, most circuit boards involve many layers and often require tolerances in their manufacture of less than a micron. Physically placing fiber optics and connecting the fibers to the chips can be too inaccurate and time consuming to be widely adopted in circuit board manufacturing processes. Optical interconnects between chips have therefore proven illusive, despite the need for broadband data transfer.